Interim Sermon Series: July 16 through August 12th
The Trinity and You
“No doctrine of the church is more important or more profound… no doctrine is so essential to our Christian thought and everyday life…yet pastors and their congregations have not really considered the implications of the Trinity. Once the doctrine is proved from Scripture, little more is taught about it. This is a tragedy since the doctrine of the Trinity is the crux of the Christian understanding of the world.… Obviously an adequate statement of the Christian world view must find its center in the Trinity for the Christian God Himself is the heart of the Christian understanding of the world.”
The words of Ralph A. Smith capture the motivation for this sermon series. For too long I and much of the evangelical world have been content to make belief in the Trinity a test of orthodoxy, but have failed to explore the implications that the Trinity has for our lives. We may understand how life works and what God wants of us, but we have lost sight of the all-encompassing picture of why life works as it does and why God calls us to be and do what He envisions for us. However, in recent years there has been an awakening among evangelical scholars resulting in a steady stream of books that applies a biblical understanding of our Triune God to our hearts and lives. As Tim Chester notes, “The Trinity is anything but irrelevant. The doctrine of the Trinity is central to how we know God, how we can be rescued from sin, how we understand the life and mission of the church and even what it means to be human.”
This five-week series will only begin to explore how our understanding of the Triune God informs all of life. But, it may also give us a thirst for continuing to grow in our understanding on how the dynamic union of Father, Son and Holy Spirit impacts our lives.
The series will cover the following:
July 15th – The Trinity and Life
July 22nd – The Trinity and Our Purpose
July 29th – The Trinity and Sin
August 5th – The Trinity and the Christian Life
August 12th – The Trinity and the Church
Bruce Ware cautions us, “We have not been reading our Bibles – particularly the New Testament – sufficiently through ‘Trinitarian glasses’ and we have not devoted ourselves to the meditation and study required to understand better just what the revelation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit means.” I trust that this series will deepen our understanding of God and life, and will provide “Trinitarian glasses” for all.